7 Creative Ideas for How to Use Facebook Photo Comments

Well, I’m sure that you, and others will devise amazingly creative ways to use this functionality in the future, but I wanted to get you started with a few creative ideas of my own.

Bear in mind that these ideas won’t be universally applicable to all business Pages, so remember to take into account how they might work given the context of your business, your goals and objectives, and how your audience uses social media and technology.

Here are 7 creative ideas for how you can use Facebook’s new photo commenting feature to drive engagement with your audience:

Photo scavenger hunts

A nice thing about the Facebook photo commenting feature is that it is retroactively functional for all of your past posts. Engage your audience by creating a photo update that asks your audience to find that photo in a previous update further down your timeline. ‘Hide’ the photo in the comments of a previous update by using the photo comment feature on an old post.

Fill in the blank… with a photo

As you know, fill in the blank updates on Facebook are really common. Take your next brand-relevant fill in the blank update to the next level by asking your audience to fill in the blank with a photo. You could ask them to show an emotion, demonstrate an expression, strike a pose, show something common around their house, showcase the results of your service, or anything else that may be relevant to your business or brand.

Your audience and your product

Ask your audience to photograph themselves using your product in unique and innovative ways, and post those photos as comments. Not only will this give your audience an opportunity to demonstrate their creativity, but it will be educational to other audience members who may not have thought about a certain application of your product.

Bring your audiences’ comments to life

You’ll need to be selective with how you do this, and not every comment will warrant a photo response, but there are cases when you could surprise and delight your audience by responding to a comment with a photo. Think of instances where a commenter asks a question about how to use something, suggests a new feature or offering, contributes ideas for how to further communicate your brand story; all of these are great opportunities for creating a photo comment in response to your audience.

Recipe customization

This is getting pretty specific, but if your business is at all food related, posting recipes might be in your wheelhouse. Ask your audience to customize a recipe you’ve posted and leave a photo comment with their result.

Weekend road-trip update

If your business is an automotive brand, car dealership, car parts manufacturer, manufacturer of GPS devices, GPS software developer, or really anything to do with cars and transport, ask your audience to post a picture of their weekend excursions or road-trips as comments to your update. What’s nice about this is that they’ll likely already have a picture to share; it’s just a matter of posting it as a comment, which is pretty simple.

Commenting milestones

There may be instances where you want to encourage your audience to hit certain milestones of sociability (i.e. when this post reaches 1,000 shares, we’ll release the next installment of our video series). Consider using photo comments on your own posts to mark various milestones and encourage increased sociability.

_

As mentioned above, these are just a few thought-starters, but I hope you find them to be helpful and to get your creative juices flowing.

Also, remember not to use features like this just for the sake of using them. Ensure that what you’re asking your audience to do is going to feel natural to them, and that you are always working toward pre-established goals and objectives.

How have you been using Facebook’s new photo comment feature? How do you plan to use this feature? Have you seen any businesses or brands encouraging the use of photo commenting? Do you think this maybe useful at some point, or do you think it’s going to be a flop?

The one I wasn't really clear on was the first one: Photo scavenger hunts

I understand the concept and instructions:

- post a photo update that matches a photo you posted before

- ask your users to comment as to when it was posted (guessing the date?)

... but, then you say "‘Hide’ the photo in the comments of a previous update by using the photo comment feature on an old post." This doesn't make sense to me. Why would there be a photo comment elsewhere if this is the first time you're using this? And why would you need to hide it?

Hey Ahmad - Not a problem, thanks for reading and for the comment. I actually haven't come across any businesses who are pushing for commenters to use this feature yet, but as I expressed, I think there's some interesting creative opportunity here. Like you, I'm looking forward to having a good opportunity to use this feature with some of my clients, and I'm also looking forward to see what awesome ideas others come up with for it.

If you find anyone who's using photo comments in an interesting way, it would be fantastic if you could come back here and leave another comment with a couple of links to Pages where they're being used well.

Really interesting ideas. I especially like the Recipe customization. My company has already started using photo replies and we've been experimenting to see what adds the most value. This definitely helped spark some creativity.

Matt, thanks for the article. Those are some great thought starters for the new photo comment feature in Facebook. I haven't used this new feature yet but I'm excited to see how many new and innovative ways businesses will take this feature to the next level. Do you know of any companies that have already started to use some of these ideas you suggested here? I haven't seen too much use of the photo comments as of yet.